I've been following the scene of Mac gaming for a while. Isaac, the author of this project, is someone who contributes a lot to this space. He created Whisky and contributed to Ryujinx, a Switch emulator that works on Mac, and Playcover, a way to play iOS apps and games on Mac. Also, he's still 17 years old. [0]
This is a tiny detail but boy do I appreciate that he actually bothered to use the real toolkit (AppKit, SwiftUI, whatever) for the GUI… I am so, so tired of projects like Docker Desktop that cram basic UI's into Electron and think that's somehow "fine."
AppKit (or swiftui I guess) is fairly simple. IB makes having a correctly behaving UI super easy - far more so than jumping through CSS hoops, and your app will behave correctly on macOS, which electron apps do not.
Electron apps are only easier if you don’t care about good UI, just “cheap cross platform”. It’s even more obnoxious when many of these “apps” can be loaded in safari and then interact properly with the rest of the system.
Electron apps are lowest common denominator apps where the primary goal is cheap rather than good. There is no user facing metric by which an electron app is superior to a native one: they’re slower, bigger, and use vastly more memory, and result in drastically worse battery life.
Much props to the maintainers for making this available at all, but I gotta say that as a user (gamer), the experience is a pain. Some games work, sort of, after a lot of configuration (often with outdated instructions, https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/Game-Support. Many games don't work at all, or only work on some platforms (e.g. Battle.net but not Steam for Diablo 4). Dozens of issues remain unaddressed: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues
I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified.
In the meantime, I find that GeForce Now (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/) provides a much more seamless, one-click-and-play experience. It works every time and doesn't break on every update, etc. Its primary downside (aside from a very reasonable monthly subscription fee) is that it has a relatively small game library, with only a subset of Steam/Epic/Xbox title available to play. But of the games it supports, it provides an overwhelmingly better experience than Whisky, GPT, or even native Apple Silicon gaming. The 4080 is dramatically more powerful than even the highest end Mac, and running it in the cloud means no local noise or heat, and much much better battery life. For anyone interested in actually gaming on a Mac without headaches, with good graphics and a good framerate, I'd strongly recommend GFN and just ignoring the ports or emulation layers. It's just a much better experience.
>I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified.
Valve cooperated with Codeweavers, the makers of Crossover, to build Proton. And afaik Apple „works“ with Codeweavers. Well at least they don‘t get in the way to incorporate GPTK into Crossover. Apple changed the licence of GPTK so that Codeweavers can include GPTK.
Good point! Have you had any experience with CrossOver? Does it tend to work better than Whisky?
Part of the nuance here is that although both can use GPT underneath, there's still a lot of config that needs to happen beforehand (e.g. different "sync" modes that impact not just visual fidelity, but whether the game will even launch at all). Does CrossOver take care of all that for you (with predefined pre-game profiles, perhaps) or do you still have to manually configure every title?
> Good point! Have you had any experience with CrossOver? Does it tend to work better than Whisky?
It certainly does. It has presets for most mainstream games and it uses the latest version of Wine.
The author of Whisky, in a move that can't be praised enough, has decided to not update further the version of CrossOver on which Whisky relies. This is so that Whisky does not become a free clone of CrossOver, given that CodeWeavers are the ones developing Wine. So, I'd say it is worth using CrossOver! They also have a free trial, so I'd give it a try and compare it with Whisky for a specific game, and see what runs better!
Not in depth. I’m just a user of Crossover, I haven’t had time to try Whisky.
I think sometimes Codeweavers incorporates fixes for certain games into the app updates. Especially for the Steam app, for example. These appear in the changelogs.
I use Crossover with CXPatcher because I then can use more up-to-date versions of DXVK and GPTK. The update cycle of Crossover is a bit slow for what is going on in that space right now.
I’ve been using Whisky for a month or so to play Hogwarts Legacy on my M1 Max. Lots of fun. Performance is fine. The M1 Max is definitely not a 4090, but it’s nice that I can play the game at all!
From a quick search suggesting somewhat relevant results:
- Using AMD FSR 2 to upscale a 1280x720 render target to 1080p, and all graphic presets set to low they benchmarked ~42 FPS on M1 Pro and 47 FPS on M1 Max.
Around the same ish ballpark as with a GTX 700 series dedicated GPU, released 10 years ago. And around twice the performance of other integrated graphics of other modern CPUs.
At those settings I'm getting about 40 fps. If I bump it up to ultra I get about 32 fps. If I go for retina (2304x1490 upscaled to 3456x2234) I'm down to 25fps, and when I step inside a building I get around 33fps.
The graphics settings to ultra, and retina, you manage 25fps? With FSR perhaps? That's still very impressive if that's the case. I assumed the performance penalty would be severe
Indeed. I think I only mentioned it because of the original reference to it not being a RTX 4090, with a somewhat adjusted perspective of what performance it is closer to.
I'm getting around 25-30fps at ultra with AMD FSR 2 set to quality. Not great, but perfectly playable for me. In Whisky I enabled "Retina mode", otherwise it runs at 1/4 resolution.
Why don't we ever get the opposite? I want this but a MacOS emulator (really a library implementing the MacOS apis), so Mine, not Wine. Allowing me to e.g. run Safari on Linux.
The work is impressive, but I don't see a future where anyone manages to stay ahead of Apple and emulates macOS. Wine has decades of work, tons of support from companies with a vested interest in its success, and a clear need (running Windows games on Linux and Mac, running Office et al. on Linux). I am an inveterate macOS user and I don't see any benefit to a project like this for Linux. Who wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS? There's way too few people with this werid mindset to make a project of this scope viable.
Replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" and "macOS" with "Windows" in your post, and it is the exact statement I would have written ~2003 when I first played around with wine. Around 2004 I ran CS 1.5 online using wine on a linux box, and changed my mind. Today, in 2023, it seems like Windows games are better run with wine on Linux or macOS (the wine-bottles are basically sandboxed windows editions that I can create or scrub anytime I want). It is incredible how usefully sometimes software becomes 20 years later.
It's great we can run big games on Linux in 2023 but my laptop with a RTX3050 turns into a jet engine with ProtonGE and often drops frames, has to compile shaders, etc. I've used all tricks I could find to make this better. Some of it is lack of support, but it's mostly not as efficient to emulate things (shocking revelation, I know).
If you boot the same machine in Win11, it's silent playing most games, zero stutter, just smooth.
macOS going through the same means in 2043 they might be enjoying the extra heat dissipation.
Proton isn't an emulator, though shaders do need to be compiled which can be problematic when it's happening constantly. For many games there is next to no overhead -- some games even run better in my experience.
I've had the opposite experience but I'm glad people are having a positive experience in general.
To be clear, I'm really thankful this exists. It's has been super helpful not having to reboot into Windows so often but, in my experience, even with a lot of tweaking things aren't better than on Windows.
Even back in 2003, Windows had the two things I mentioned: games and Office. Wine might have been woefully inadequate back then, but people already wanted to run those two things on Linux. You lacked imagination in 2003.
>> wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS?
Everyone who wants to do video editing on a Linux box. Or, in other words, everyone who doesn't want to buy and maintain a $$$$ apple machine just for occasional video editing. The same people who don't want to keep windows boxes running just because one random client needs them to use some random Windows only software
Most of those folks, in my experience, just have a Windows computer, or dual-boot.
I use the Photoshop part of my Adobe subscription mostly on a Mac, but I boot my desktop over to Windows if I need to use Premiere and After Effects because applying to those problems a GPU that weighs as much as my Mac does counts for something.
Video editing falls into the category of running Office and the rest.
What’s wrong with running Adobe Premiere through Wine?
Oh and there’s way too few people who would want to video edit with Linux but Mac software. I mean there’s probably a hundred people on the planet, no joke.
Honest question, but why would you want this? Wine is obvious, there was a lot of software exclusively on Windows with no match on Linux when the project started, and that still is very true today for games.
While there certainly is a handful of exclusive software for the Mac, I don't see anything that would generate broader interest in this.
Hackintoshing. I don't want to buy a separate machine just to make iOS apps, but sadly I have had to do so. A few years ago I was able to run Windows, macOS, and Linux in Proxmox, it worked pretty well, but I'm not sure how long that will still be available as macOS moves fully to ARM.
You can either 1) run macOS in a VM, though I'm only familiar with running macOS VMs on Linux, 2) VNC into a real Mac, or 3) run Safari for Windows from 2012 [1]
I prefer Heroic Game Launcher. It detects GPTK if installed and compiled via homebrew, but also has a built in downloader for different wine binaries (crossover or verbatim wine). You can set each wine runtime for each game. Plus, Heroic can login and download your Epic and GoG games.
Probably correct, I am a steam user of course but I always prefer to buy games on GoG (because of the DRM-free situation). And possibly because a lot of my steam games already run on Mac natively.
I would love to see a table with level of support and framerate for a few CPU's here. I know it depends on contributions but I think the community would be happy to do so if this takes off.
Hi there, Isaac here. Early days of GPTK this was definitely a concern, so we required you to download the dmg from Apple's website yourself, but around beta 4, with feedback from the community, they changed the license to allow for redistribution in cases like this.
I'm unsure that they'd actually do this. As I recall, the original Rosetta required Apple to pay royalties to IBM and it was basically only useful for Mac OS X binary compatibility. Being able to translate x86 binaries is somewhat more general in application and I don't think Apple is paying royalties on Rosetta 2.
There is a cost to maintaining and keeping it functional as macOS gets updated. Apple doesn't care about legacy support or backward compatibility, so they will eventually drop it as they had dropped 32-bit support. I am sure Apple wants developers to view Rosetta 2 as already deprecated and to update their new releases to Universal 2 binaries.
Rosetta 2 expects certain capabilities from ARM CPU, which exists solely for the purpose of running x86 simulation. Apple will drop that in future versions of their SoCs and Rosetta will go as well.
Based on decades of historical precedent. Apple has migrated from 68k to PowerPC to Intel to ARM. You can no longer run PowerPC applications on current MacOS, as Rosetta v1 was dropped five years after migrating to Intel. Likewise 68k emulation was dropped some time after transitioning to PowerPC. Rosetta v2 is another temporary solution until x86 support is completely gone a few years from now, unless they intend to continue offering the Game Porting Toolkit.
Except that those situations were materially different from the current situation in two huge ways:
1. The architecture they're migrating away from is the dominant architecture in the market (both now and for the past few decades), meaning that rather than simply losing support for older MacOS software, they'd be losing access to easy virtualization of everything Windows and Linux can do.
2. The architecture they're migrating to is their own, 100% in their control, meaning that they can maintain hardware-level support for this translation layer without needing to convince any other company to put that effort in on each subsequent chip generation.
Now, does this mean they're guaranteed to maintain Rosetta 2 forever? No, of course not. I don't know what Apple's going to do any more than you or viktorcode do.
But it does mean that seeing this transition as being exactly a mirror of the past 2 architecture transitions they did is dangerous, at best.
Agreed that this is a different situation. If they drop Rosetta then Crossover is gone and Game Porting Toolkit is finished. Also Docker will be limited without x86. I'm using that to run SQL Server on Linux on MacOS for work.
This is an unprecedented situation given their new push into Mac gaming, seemingly trying to convince AAA studios that there is a market. If successful they can increase their user base and steal some thunder from Steam, and it probably bodes well for their Vision plans.
I'd say they have an incentive to not drop Rosetta until they reach a critical nexus of support from the studios... enough that it will cause the laggards to quickly add support once it's taken away. Maybe that will be there in a couple years, but likely it will take a bit longer.
The historical precedent of dropping ARMv6 support from Apple SoCs, for instance. No matter what the secrecy level of a corporation is, no one will waste their CPU area for backwards compatibility when it's no longer demanded by the majority of the user base. It runs agains the economics of hardware production.
Another argument for dropping Rosetta (2) is that it forces developers to make the transition instead of lingering in dependence of the translation. And if they don’t make the transition, get dropped by the wayside.
All x86 software being run on macOS relies on Rosetta 2. It effectively does a translation of x86 binaries to ARM binaries. Then, WINE handles the PE to mach-o translation along with providing a system call translation from Windows to *nix. Game porting toolkit then adds in macOS specific stuff as well as Vulkan and DirectX translation to Metal.
Since a few weeks I've been using the cheapest base model Mac Mini M2 which I got from a major german retailer for 650€ (all taxes included) brand-new. The gaming capabilities on 1080p are amazing and surprised me. I don't think there is any comparable WIntel machine for that price available (and within same form factor) with comparable gaming performance - mostly because available iGPUs are not powerful enough. I can see how that will change with the release of the new AMD Phoenix Desktop APUs, but we will have to wait if vendors bundle it into this slick, quiet, neat-looking machine that is the Mac Mini. Downside is of course, you have to mess with GPTK and Heroic/Whiskey, the UX is not nearly as slick as Steam+Proton on Linux.
I hope GPTK is just Apples first foray into gaming, they could release a trimmed-down version (less ports, no ethernet, no speaker) of a Mac Mini with a gaming focus and compete with PS5/Xbox on the price. But it needs better software UX for gaming just like Proton did for Linux.
I do hope that between M-series SoCs and AMD APUs, it becomes normal and expected for mainstream computing devices across the board to have reasonable graphical capabilities without the unavoidable heat, power hunger, and added cost of a discrete GPU. There’s not much reason for iGPUs to be as weak as we’ve become accustomed to with Intel CPUs.
The benefit from this happening would be twofold: it gives a much wider spread of users access to hardware that can deal well with moderate graphical workloads and it provides a common minimum spec for game devs to keep in mind that’s actually powerful enough to deliver a decent experience (as compared to now, where iGPUs are near writeoffs for anything but esports titles).
> not much reason for iGPUs to be as weak as we’ve become accustomed to with Intel CPUs.
It requires more silicon which will increase power consumption and require more heat dissipation... same issues with discrete GPUs. Where would the additional performance come from?
Somewhat powerful iGPUs do require more silicon, but the design of that silicon is going to differ compared its discrete counterpart — whereas discrete GPUs are typically designed for most performance possible with the least silicon at the cost of heat and power usage, iGPUs are designed for perf per watt, as seen in Apple’s M-series SoCs. There’s probably some energy savings to be had from the GPU sharing system memory and moving data around less.
On the software side of things, iGPU drivers tend to better optimized for efficiency compared to discrete GPU drivers, where that’s almost an afterthought and in some cases broken (like the laptop I had where the sleep state in the drivers for its Nvidia card was broken for years).
I don't think they will be even close to the gaming performance since they only have Intel iGPUs. No way this does 1080p@60 for some AAA games from 2-3 years ago. And those models with dGPU are way out of the price range of the basemodel Mac Mini.
There are actually some devices that could complete on paper specs, like the Beelink GTR7 or other small form-factors. Problem is, they are made by some chinese manufacturers, and even though Xiami is not a small company, the build quality can vary, and availability is completely random. Especially the Beelink one with the AMD 7840 chips seems to be vaporware - there were youtubers and magazines reviewing it a couple of month back, but I was unable to find a retailer that actually has it, and it seems to have gone away from the homepage. They are also probably not very big on support and returns.
Didt things got better lately? I had very limited success with crossover circa 2021. And that's from a point of view from someone who have no Windows actively running on personal devices. Comparing to what I get in my Linux AMD GPU machine crossover seems to be not as good.
Just found this a few days ago, looks like a nice start, but less developed (so far) than some of the others. I landed on Wineskin for my usage (playing AoE2) as i found it most understandable. Also check out Porting Kit for click and play.
Yeah. I hesitate to be harsh on a volunteer project. It’s clearly got a lot of brilliance behind it. But yeah, all the games I tried today failed to run unfortunately.
On the other hand, the Steam launcher itself somehow runs faster via Whisky than the native Mac version.
In a lot of countries, drinking wine is fine (as in legal) at ANY age.
It's the purchase that is so often regulated.
(And you're right, in many places the latter limit is lower than 18. For example in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Belgium, non-spirits like wine and beer can be bought from 16.)
The two (drinking age vs. alcohol buying age) often get confused, but consumption limits per se are actually pretty rare. (Assuming it takes place in private – laws regarding drinking in public are somewhat more common.)
Maybe he's thinking about the story about how Queen Victoria used to find the claret at state dinners too weak for her, so would take a flask of Royal Lochnagar whisky to supercharge her wine.[1]
But what does "excellent" mean? Can you play any game with modern graphics at native resolution with at least 60 fps? That's barely happening on gaming laptops so I am kind of wondering if maybe the reason this sort of vague praise never mentions any particular games, settings, frames per second, etc. You know, the useful information.
I am writing this on a light Linux laptop with a Ryzen 6800H APU. It is somewhat capable for a laptop this small and light but it is no match for my gaming PC. Kind of doubt my m2 max is going to offer better gaming experience.
What vague praise? I mentioned I mostly play older games. Your M2 Max won't get anywhere near gaming PC performance, but now that DX12 is mostly working some recent games should work with lower graphics settings. The Youtube channel I linked tests a lot of different games on various machines, and it doesn't take much time to just test it out yourself.
These games should be playable on an M2 Max: Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo IV, Control, Dead Space, Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man Remastered, FF7 Remake, Shadow Warrior 3
Recently I've been playing AOE2 DE, it's upscaled to native resolution and runs at 120fps with highest graphics.
It did take me a while to fiddle with everything to get it right. I play most of the games through Steam on Porting Kit, which for the most part "just works" if you're playing a supported game.
If you're doing it through Whiskey there can be a bit of trial and error getting the right DLLs loaded.
>> shame that Apple doesn't partner with Valve on this, although not surprising in the least.
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Please no. The Linux community, small and nerdy, is relatively self-supporting. The vastly larger apple community want things to just work. That's what they are paying for when they buy apple products. The deluge of support requests might push valve away from the entire concept.
Why? Everyone wants things to "just work", but nobody besides Windows and Xbox users can run native DirectX. Seeing as MacOS and Linux users have to cope with this individually, it makes sense that they would share a lot of the underlying work. They already do, courtesy of Codeweavers.
If Apple offered hardware-level Vulkan support on their systems, gaming on Mac would "just work" like it does on Steam Deck, for the most part. Even if they didn't, Apple could still improve on Game Porting Toolkit by open-sourcing their fork, accepting contributions or (gasp) upstreaming their work. Valve does every one of those things, and their gaming experience on Linux is console-quality because of it. Apple doesn't necessarily have to work with Valve, but it sure would reduce the amount of redundant work both parties are responsible for.
Yes, apple can do lots of things to help the process. In any partnership, it would be Valve would be fighting the uphill battle to keep customers happy. Linux users will generally try for hour/days to get a game working before submitting a support request. Apple users aren't that nerdy. Linux users want things to just work. Apple users expect it.
I still don't understand the conflict of interest. Valve is closer to pushbutton game compatibility than Apple, their translation kits are both based on DXVK and they both use tons of Codeweavers code. In a lot of ways, they're retreading the same path with zero tangible benefit to the user.
Obviously Game Porting Toolkit is not meant to be a crutch, but it's clear there's demand for games to work on Apple hardware. As a user, why are you opposed to having more options alongside Apple's more restricted, curated offerings?
Sure, but I don't see why adding functionality would be a bad thing. There are thousands of games that will just never be ported away from 32-bit Windows. If Apple doesn't intend to keep those running forever, they should at least equip the community with the tools to fix it themselves.
It makes sense why Apple doesn't want it, but I'm surprised to see the community reject the idea too. The "set and forget" experience of the Steam Deck is fantastic, and entirely attainable with Apple's homogenized hardware pool.
Meh. I think Valve would definitely support Proton on Linux if Mac had Vulkan support on the GPU. High performance DX 9,10,11,12 translation to Vulkan is what made Proton possible. And no MoltenVK is not enough.
The rule of thumb is generally that for Windows games pre-2008ish, Parallels is a better choice, since they tend to rely on weird corners of Windows compatibility and 32-bit performance in Wine is still not always great. DXVK + MoltenVK is generally the best choice for anything post-2000s, pre-DX11, and GPT/D3DM is generally the best choice for anything DX11/DX12.
That’s my experience too. It looks like some modern games that are 64 bit and use DX12 and thus game porting toolkit‘s dx2metal work quite okay, but 32 bit DirectX<11 games run particularly awfully.
And I’m running what the community has dubbed the best way, crossover with cxpatcher.
[0] https://isaacmarovitz.com/